Polish director Marcin Wrona, who premiered
his crime thriller The Christening
at the Festival in 2010, returns to the
Vanguard programme with Demon. A
clever take on one of the most famous
figures of Jewish folklore — the dybbuk, a
spirit of a person not properly laid to rest
that seeks to inhabit the body of a living
person — Wrona's latest sets a creepy tale
of possession squarely in the middle of a
night of wild revelry.

Peter (Israeli actor Itay Tiran, previously
seen at the Festival in Lebanon) has just
arrived from England to marry his beautiful
fiancée, Zaneta (Agnieszka Zulewska),
at her family's country house in rural
Poland. The old homestead is a gift from his
future father-in-law, and Peter is excited to
renovate it into a home for his new family.
While inspecting the grounds on the eve
of his nuptials, Peter finds skeletal human
remains buried on the property. Haunted by
his discovery, Peter slowly starts to unravel
while the joyous and drunken traditional
Polish wedding goes on around him; and
soon, he is overcome by what seem to be
epileptic fits, panicking his bride and scandalizing
his father-in-law.

As the night wears on, it becomes apparent
that there is an uninvited guest at the
wedding, that she is lonely — and that she
is very, very dead.

Though Wrona based his script on Piotr
Rowicki's play Adherence, the result is
anything but stagey. As the wedding celebration
whirls around our possessed hero,
and Wrona adroitly tosses in moments of
unexpected humour and sharply observed
realism, Demon becomes a thrillingly kinetic
cinematic experience.